The rating system works best on initial matches. Depending on the population size, that will be either 3v3, 4v4, or 5v5. Once the initial team has been created, the best we can do right now is try to put players on the least ranked team. Shuffling players would remove player’s ships selections so we’ve not gone down that path. Your situation is a good example of one of the worst cases with the current system (and population size), and we’re continuing to track and decide the best way to make the matches fairer with the population size we have.

This problem seems to be limited to certain members. The cap is actually at 60FPS and in our internal testing in both windowed and full screen, that number is the actual FPS cap. It might help narrow things down if you could list your browser, OS, and video card. Other members who have experienced this mention that it happens in all Unity based games (not just ours) – so it would be helpful to test a few others and report that as well.

The current system is based completely on if you win or lose, not based on your individual performance within a match. The rating system highlights how often a player wins, not how good they are. There is hopefully some correlation between good players and winning more, but ultimately, we’re caring about the win/loss relationship.

A few other quick tips: the system will ignore new players in cases where it would harm your rating. The system adjusts your rating by using the accumulated ratings of your opponents to determine the change in your rating (so if a high ranked team loses to a low ranked team, the low ranks gain more and the high ranks loses more). Another note is that most matches we’ve seen made are within 100 points average of each other (any many are much lower) so the ratings are fairly equal.

We have some decent metrics now on the teams being made but the biggest fix will be an increase in the numbers of players queuing up. Without that, the only thing we really could do is make everyone wait significantly longer, which most people do not want. The ideas everyone has been contributing are great and we’ll continue looking into ways to make the whole system work better, thanks!

Please do not use the word “Official” in forum posts if you are not a representative of END Games or Kongregate. This misleads the rest of the community and creates ill will. I am locking this thread shortly as it is not very productive.

We have investigated numerous reports of hacking in Vorp. So far the majority of the problems have been related to low quality connections to our servers (e.g. distant outside of the U.S. players) and not hacking. Not to say there aren’t people attempting to cheat, but so far the cases people have complained about the most vocally are just not.

We are working on improving the game client performance to handle high latency/low throughput connections more seamlessly.

If you still suspect someone of cheating or hacking, please send us a bug report or private message. We primarily monitor our own server side statistics for these cases. We do intend to add other methods of reporting in-game as we go forward as well.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions – it’s always helpful to see what people find the most important. I’ll address some of the issues below. If you don’t see your issue addressed, we’ve added it to our internal list to review.

Various issues:
As Darth pointed out, there is a First Win of the Day bonus now in the latest version.

And the friend invitation system is almost here!

The surrender system currently makes it so that the surrendering team doesn’t receive much bang at all, but the winning team will still receive any bonuses they earned. The game also ends up being shorter so you can jump into a new match and hopefully earn the same amount of bang overall as if you had played a longer game. But we’ll keep watching that and we’ll be tracking concedes more in the future to determine how well this works out.

The game does reduce the amount of effects if you are on lower quality settings, but we’ll continue addressing performance concerns for lower graphics cards! Some of the performance settings only take place if you were in lower quality settings before you began the game, so if you’re adjusting while in the game, wait for the next game and give it another shot.

You’ll notice in your screen shot that the game attempted to give your team more advanced players to balance for the new player. It’s actually using a rating system behind the scenes (that’ll be exposed soon so you can see your rating), so it’s not just level dependent. Unfortunately it looks like the new player left and we’ll also be tweaking things for “leavers” soon as well.

We also have a system where new players are segregated and it prefers to make games for just the new players – but if they end up waiting too long it’ll start adding them to normal games. This last system is getting some more love in our next patch as well to keep more new players together.

On the other hand, nothing helps a new player like really good teammates showing them how to play!

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